Publishers, record labels, digital distributors, streaming music services – these days it seems like everyone involved in creative works can earn some money except the creators themselves. (Rosanne Cash earned $114 from 600,000 streaming audio plays.) Here are the stories of two struggles – by John Steinbeck’s descendants and by one particular singer-songwriter grand-nephew and his partner – to claw some income back.

“Although no one would comment on the particulars, Perseus’s unique position in the book world could have made valuing the company difficult, especially the company’s distribution arm; there has not been a major sale of a distributor since the beginning of the digital book age.”

“Digital presentations of content in general make it a lot easier to deliver things in lots and lots of different ways. It’s good to have flexibility, but it also means there might be a point where it becomes almost impossible to make your vision available to people without agreeing in advance to make it customizable to the point where it ceases to be art at all.”

“Movie theater owners throughout the world are fretting over the possibility of a lockout at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. The Met’s live broadcasts into theaters on Saturdays have generated an estimated $300 million since Julie Taymor’s production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute was beamed into cinemas in 2006.”

“Officials at ABT said on Thursday that the New York company is donating its archives of more than 50,000 items of visual and written documentation to the Library of Congress. The donation coincides with ABT’s coming 75th anniversary celebrations.”

“Although there has always been a range of possibilities and venues within the arts — from community theater to Broadway, from art-house films to summer blockbusters, from the Cinema Bar to the Fabulous Forum — modern technology has brought entertainment more than ever into line with this existential state of affairs. We now live in the age of the microaudience.”

“HBO’s success in the 21st century is all about its own shows, not the movies that come on in between. Similarly, Netflix subscriptions have surged as the company gains a name for itself as a producer of its own great shows, and it plans to start making even more. To make HBO money, it seems, Netflix will keep trying to become more like HBO.”

“Mapping the geography of cultural migration does gives you some insight about how the kind of culture we value has shifted over the centuries. It’s also a novel lens through which to view our more general history, as those migration trends likely illuminate bigger historical happenings like wars and the building of cross-country infrastructure. At the end of the video you see Florida blowing up in red. More proof that indeed, the sunshine state is a damn nice place to die.”

“I knew you were going to take a hit, but I had no idea it would be like this. Are you worried? Because you should be. What if Amazon says, ‘Why should we sell Doug Preston’s books? He’s a thorn in our sides.’ Guess what? All this goes away.”

For that matter, what is a minute, really? Newton “believed that time was absolute – marked by God’s great metronome in the sky. It was certainly not subjective.” Einstein once wrote, “People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” And then there’s David Lamelas’s conceptual piece Time.

“There’s a lot of advice about English usage that we largely take for granted, from split infinitives to dangling participles, but where did anyone get these ideas in the first place?” Linguist Robin Straaijer writes about his Hyper Usage Guide of English (HUGE)database project, using as an example the hopefully wars, which (like so many culture wars) has been fought since the ’60s.

“The Nashville Ballet is embarking on an unprecedented public fundraising campaign to finance an expansion project to grow studio space, renovate its Sylvan Heights headquarters and dramatically increase the number of students.” The campaign, called ELEVATE, “has already raised $3.7 million out of its goal of $5.5 million.”

“So with the internet letting us hear just about any music and see any musician any time we want, for a comparatively low cost of entry, in theory it could provide an ideal opportunity to get rid of genres. Unfortunately, one thing technology can’t do is make the day longer than 24 hours. There’s more information, and more music, more easily accessible to more people than ever before, but no one actually has time to read or listen to more than a fraction of it. So we still must rely on gatekeepers and sorting mechanisms, one of which is musical genre, and radio, retail, presenters, and media all continue to categorize music according to whether it is rock, pop, hip-hop, country, R&B, classical, blues, folk, jazz, and so on.”

Peter Schjeldahl: “It is idle to lament democratizing developments that have been inexorable for well over half a century, … [but at]what point does a widely shared yen for aesthetic engagement alter the character of that engagement? We’ve reached that point on many days … where the crowds experience mainly crowdedness.”

Anthony Tommasini: “It’s telling that both sides have latched on to the role of new productions to buttress their arguments. Mr. Gelb has long said that bold new productions will … entice new audiences to the house … The unions claim that the new productions are too risky and expensive. … But this argument over the new productions could compromise the artistic ambition and global influence of the company.”